Global Courant
China is spending billions of dollars a year to shape perceptions of China through influence, censorship and disinformation in a massive campaign that could threaten global freedoms, the United States said.
“Beijing has invested billions of dollars to build a global information ecosystem that promotes its propaganda and facilitates censorship and the spread of disinformation,” the Foreign Ministry spokesperson said in a statement Thursday after the report’s publication from the Global Engagement Center.
The report noted that Beijing used a number of “deceptive and coercive methods” to try to influence the international information environment and “bend the global information environment in its favor.”
“If left unchecked, the PRC’s efforts will reshape the global information landscape, creating biases and gaps that could even lead countries to make decisions that subordinate their economic and security interests to those of Beijing,” the report warned, referring to the country by its official’s initials. name: People’s Republic of China.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its influence campaigns on social media platforms such as the world, sometimes even buying control of points of sale.
The US report identified five key elements of China’s global media strategy: leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, combining co-optation and pressure, and exerting control over the Chinese-language media.
Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own, has long been on the front lines of China’s media war.
Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told Al Jazeera earlier this month that Taipei was preparing for Beijing to step up its disinformation and disinformation campaigns ahead of January’s presidential election.
He also noted how China had tried to frame the Ukraine narrative in the eyes of the people of Taiwan.
“From the war in Ukraine, the Chinese have been pushing the Russian narratives in Taiwan: ‘The war was started by the United States or NATO and the United States is not interested in helping Ukraine. The United States is not interested in peace between Ukraine and Russia because the United States continues to supply weapons to Ukraine,” Wu said.
“They work on that day in, day out. We took a poll in the middle of last year and the Taiwanese people’s trust in the United States dropped by about 10 percent. That is quite significant.”
The State Department said that as of 2021, nearly 100 influencers were known to spread official Chinese messages in at least 20 languages on multiple social media platforms to a combined audience of more than 11 million people.
Oppression, manipulation
In other examples of China’s attempt to shape the global narrative, the State Department said more than 1,000 pro-Beijing online accounts had tried to suppress a report by Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group, detailing China’s activities of suspected overseas police stations came to light in 53 countries. around the world.
It noted that Beijing’s attempts to shape its narrative also extend to technological hardware, citing a September 2021 report from the Lithuanian National Cyber Security Center that found mobile phones made by Xiaomi default to the ability had to censor a list of at least 449 sentences. It was disabled in European shipments, but could be activated remotely.
Such mechanisms reflect China’s own tightly controlled online space, where words, phrases and images deemed sensitive are impossible to post or quickly removed.
The US report also pointed to media partnerships developed by state-owned China Central Television (CCTV), which it says provides free video footage and television scripts to 1,700 foreign news organizations and media groups. It said such content was “in many cases” repackaged by local outlets without any indication of its origin.
State-owned newspapers such as the China Daily have similar agreements.
China has also tried to influence perceptions through outreach programs – accompanying groups of diplomats and journalists on trips to the far western region of Xinjiang, where the United Nations has accused Beijing of possible crimes against humanity for killing as many as a million, mostly Muslim Uyghurs, has been detained. re-education camps.
This month, a group of 22 journalists from more than a dozen countries, including France, Malaysia, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, visited the region for a week.
A CCTV video report of the visit showed the journalists watching cultural dances and told the channel they were impressed by the peace and stability of Xinjiang and the happiness of its people.
A report by one of the Malaysian journalists on the tour included photos of knives and guns from an ‘Exhibition of Major Terrorist Attacks and Violent Crimes’.
China has argued that the camps are vocational training centers needed to tackle “extremism.”
The US said China was also creating a “community of digital authoritarians” through its export of surveillance and “smart city” systems, such as those widely used in places like Xinjiang. It added that the installation of technologies produced by telecommunications giant Huawei also made countries vulnerable to Chinese influence.
As of November 2021, at least 18 countries are said to be using Huawei-made middleboxes, which facilitate and inspect internet traffic on some online networks, to block access to certain sites.
The US is among countries that have banned Huawei from its advanced telecommunications networks over security and privacy concerns over its ties to Beijing.
Huawei has denied any such links.
